Arthur Milchior's personal blog

Saturday, May 4 2019

Anki and learning which require practice (origami, knot, instrument...)

I use anki to learn things which require practice. Origami, drawing, music, rope (nodes and shibari). Music will be considered in another text.

I consider two kinds of practical knowledge:

some practice requires making choices regularly (like drawing, or musical improv)
some practice requires learning and practicing some exact moves over and over. That may be the case when you want to learn a musical piece, or how to tie some particular note.

I don' have any idea how to deal with the first kind of knowledge, thus I'll only consider the second kind. I'll list here different methods, which depends on what I want to learn. I don't know in general how to decide which method is the best one.

Lists in anki: desiderata and partial solution

In this text, I assume you are familiar with anki, and in particular know what is a field, a card, a card's type (aka template), a note and a note's type (aka a model), and that you have an idea of what are the rules used by anki to decide which cards should be generated or not.

There is one big limitation in anki, it concerns lists^[1]. Here I list my trouble, the existing work arounds I know, their limits, and the functionnality I would really want. Sadly, this functionnality seems to require such a big modification of anki's underlying model that I fear that no add-on can answer my request. In particular if I want this request to also be satisfied in smartphone's application, which does not allows to add add-ons.

Learning a list of things is hard, but it's something I sometime want to do. A poem/song is just a list of line. Sometime, a mathematical notions have 4 distinct names. E.g. a pullback is also called a fiber product, a fibered product and a Cartesian square. In some othe case, a mathematical objects admits many distinct definitions^[2]. E.g. I've got 5 definitions of left-trivial monoids. And I'd also wanted to see if I can learn the list of the prime number less than 100. Mostly to see how hard it is to learn an arbitrary list.

Notes

[1] I assume here that sets are list, with an arbitrary order

[2] This is in general considered to be a proof that the object is really interesting

Using anki to learn names and people

Anki changed my life in a lot of way. But the most obvious one is that, thanks to Anki, I do finally recall people's name !

Note on an introduction on Anki given a 35C3

This post is a comment about a self-organised workshop Introduction to anki I gave at #35C3 (35th Chaos Communication Congress, a congress of 17k hackers). This workshop was announced on the anki's subredd where I asked for ideas. I received a lot of useful feedback from this subreddit and from the related discord server. The main audience of the current blog post is thus those person, already in anki's community. This post contains idea in random order.

Thursday, May 2 2019

How I lost and recovered five thousand notes in anki

I recently had a big problem with anki. Here I'm going to explain what was the problem, how I partially solved it, and what was not solved at all.

Friday, March 29 2019

The trolley problem, and what you should do if I'm on the tracks

Originally published in French and crossposted on LessWrong. Translation by Épiphanie.

Trigger warning: Death, suicide, and murder. Trolley problem.

This is quite the conventional and ethical conundrum: You are near train tracks, and a train is rolling down the hill. It is going to run over 4 people who are tied to the rails of the main track. However, you can change the train's direction to a secondary track by pulling a lever; so that it runs over only one guy, also tied down the rails. Should you pull the lever?

I do believe there is a more interesting way to frame it: What would you choose if you are yourself tied to the rails, alone, while the train is not heading toward you yet. My own answer is very simple: I want the person deciding where the train should go to have _no doubts_ they should pull the lever! Because, for lack of context, I assume that the other four people are just me, or rather copy of mes. That's a bit simplistic, of course they are not perfect clone. But as far as concrete predicates go, they are indistinguishable. That is to say I have odds of being on tracks alone of 1 in 5, and odds for being in the group of 4 in 5. And tell you what, I prefer dying with 20% probability because of what someone did, rather than to die with 80% probability because no one was ever willing to take the burden of responsibility.